The idea of a "Wiki" may seem odd at first, but dive in, explore its links and it will soon seem familiar. "Wiki" is tool for collaboratively organizing information. Hence, many projects use wikis for their documentation. They use a simplified hyper-text markup language (html), sometimes including a WYSIWYG editor. Ward Cunningham, the developed of the wiki software WikiWikiWeb.

The Wiki engine is the software that runs a Wiki. Wikis are usually web applications that run on one or more web server. The contents, including all current and previous revisions, are usually stored in either a file system or a database. The information is usually hosted by a server.

Interwiki linking is a facility for creating links to the many wikis on the World Wide Web. It users avoid pasting in entire URLs. For example, the follow code links to the Puppy Linux page on Wikipedia: